The costs for operating a print shop are generally categorized as the capitalization cost of the printing equipment, and the operating and employment costs for running the equipment. As print shops tend to transform from being lithographic to digital, additional equipment costs will be incurred so that “how” print shop facilities are managed becomes even more important to achieve desirable and more profitable operating results.
The scheduling and flow of jobs through print shops today is typically controlled by preset, often manual, scheduling policies and workflows that take into consideration only the overall equipment, physical layout and labor in the shop. Workflow is typically fixed in a departmental framework. Emphasis is given to keeping all the equipment busy, with the consequence that a lot of work in progress is generated, jobs are often late, error rates are large, and the exact status of specific jobs in progress in the shop is generally not known. Therefore, the productivity of the vast majority of print shops is far from optimal or that can be realized using modern control theory methods to adjust the scheduling, labor, and workflow to respond to both changes in the incoming job flow and to the state of the shop when the jobs are arriving.
Many print shops do acquire some data on equipment utilization, labor utilization, and percent of jobs completed on-time that are used as average characterizations of shop performance. Almost all print shops collect data for billing and evaluation of on-time delivery of jobs; however, the global nature of this data limits its ability to assist the print shop owner in making value added changes to the workflow through the print shop. The print shop owner/operator typically uses this limited data in an ad hoc manner to make empirical adjustments in global shop policies based on heuristics that make sense to the local print shop owner/operator. As a result, print shop owners/operators rarely know just how their shops are performing.
Production printing software such as FreeFlow DocuSP, Output Manager and Process Manager provided by Xerox Corporation all provide print shops with the ability to create printed output and in some ways provide the means of optimizing the overall printing operation of the print shop. They do not, however, provide sufficient information to allow for optimization.
It is believed that a need exists for a unique combination of data gathering through one or more algorithms for simplified display in an interface through which print shop owners/operators can quickly assess printer usage and volume information combined with cost and price information that can enable the owner/operator to optimize the print shop both from a print capacity standpoint and from a cost and price perspective.